The two-minute video was no different from the videos in which Islamic State captives were paraded by the peshmerga or the Iraqi forces. The room was dim, the 12 women — including a teenager — and the five men were terrified of the police officer ordering them to give their names, place of residence and ethnicity. They were allegedly caught in a brothel in Erbil; the women were portrayed as sex workers and the men as customers. Most were from the Kurdistan Region, but three of the women were from Baghdad. One woman even carried a toddler.

“My wife had loaned 100,000 dinars [$84.50] to the woman from Kirkuk and when she went to collect the debt from her, the Erbil police raided the house and took her away, too. That night they insulted her and she was beaten until the following morning,” the husband of one of the women from Baghdad told the NRT broadcasting company outside a courthouse in Erbil. “Is this the justice they talk about?”

“What were you doing there?” the police officer ordered. “I came for a f---,” one of the terrified Kurdish men responded. “How much did you pay?” the officer asked, getting a response of “40,000 [dinars].”

The video recorded at the Erbil police station was meant to be an admission of guilt, a method all too familiar in the judicial system of the Kurdistan Region. The Kurdish police forces often record video confessions of offenders and post them on police Facebook pages, and the Kurdish media regularly broadcast these videos. But this latest video created a wave of protest and resentment because of the way the police dealt with this issue, and there were calls for the police officers to be fired and for people in authority to be held responsible.